Eternal critic

For France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, there are three types of appointment. The first, as in the choice of François Fillon as prime minister, is for administrative competence or political cunning. The second, like that of Brice Hortefeux as his first immigration minister, is designed to reinforce his liberal, Atlanticist or crime-busting principles. The third, examples of which are too numerous to mention, is to send a message of political, sexual, racial or religious inclusiveness.

The appointment of Pierre Lellouche as state secretary for European affairs is also a message, this time to two foreign audiences. Short of resuscitating former president Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy could not have picked someone friendlier to the Turks’ case for EU membership. This visiting lecturer at Galatasaray University had lobbied hard to stymie a commitment to put any further EU enlargement to a referendum. And by replacing Bruno Le Maire with Lellouche, Sarkozy swapped a German-speaker in favour of a former president of NATO’s parliamentary assembly and advocate of a greater European – read: German – effort in Afghanistan.

Given the fuss over Lellouche’s appointment to this junior ministerial post, it is hard to imagine that, as recently as April 2007, Lellouche was talked about as a likely appointee as defence minister or the Elysée’s chief diplomat. Though an early and staunch Sarkozy lieutenant in his struggle with the chiraquiens and supporters of former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, Lellouche has been kept at arm’s length for the past two years.

The month after Sarkozy’s victory was especially bitter for Lellouche. A man who could hardly be politically closer to Sarkozy, who won Sarkozy top-level audiences in Washington at a time when he was merely interior minister and whose ideas permeated Sarkozy’s speeches on Russia, Iran and Israel, Lellouche had to watch as the defence ministry went to Hervé Morin, a man who only a month earlier had been campaigning against Sarkozy for the centrist François Bayrou. Then, the chairmanship of the Elysée’s new national security council – a body Lellouche himself had co-designed – went to Jean-David Levitte. Not only was Levitte a Chirac intimate and, in Lellouche’s view, a key player in the most dangerous and unnecessary Franco-American crisis since 1966; worse, he had opposed the creation of the council he would head.

With a government job lost, Sarkozy and Fillon pressed Lellouche’s case for the chairmanship of the national assembly’s foreign affairs or defence committees, but he was frozen out by Jean-François Copé, the chiraquien leader of Sarkozy’s parliamentary party. Eventually, Lellouche lost patience, saying: “The guys who have fought for five years to win the Elysée and see today their president say he will take this or that Socialist minister; it’s enough to make them laugh.”

It is this propensity to say exactly what he thinks that has made Sarkozy hesitate about Lellouche. At a time when Sarkozy needed to steal his opponents’ political clothes, this chippy, partisan and quick-tempered Atlanticist was a luxury he felt he could not afford. No one, except Sarkozy in his crime-fighting days, has shown the same ability to rile the left – most recently in a television debate when a left-wing politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused him of being a US Central Intelligence Agency spy. “I may be CIA,” said an outraged Lellouche, “but you, Mélenchon, you are a loser, a deadbeat, and if this were the 19th century, I would challenge you to a duel and kill you.”

Lellouche has been goading the left since 1993, when the sometime lawyer chose to stop advising Chirac, then mayor of Paris, on foreign policy, and run for parliament against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a poster-boy minister in the Socialist government, in a working-class district of Val d’Oise in Île-de-France. This should have been a shoo-in for Strauss-Kahn, but Lellouche contrasted his origins as the son of a hard-working Tunisian-Jewish small businessman in north African neighbourhoods with Strauss-Kahn’s “gauche caviar” appeal. “I’m too poor to be on the left,” he once quipped. He won.

Ten years later, he enraged the left by calling for a joint Franco-American initiative to ensure Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction and by advocating regime-change in Baghdad. He then warned against the growth of a new “left anti-Semitism”, originating on the extreme left and Green movements but now “contaminating” the moderate left. His 2006 book “Illusions Gauloises” laid into what he called “Amélie’s France” – a land turning into a theme park for tourists and for fantasists who believe the EU exists to rob them of their welfare and who refuse to face up to their global responsibilities. When Sarkozy visited then US president George W. Bush that autumn, Lellouche penned an essay entitled “Anti-Americanism: the religion of imbeciles”.

A man never before entrusted with office, Lellouche has been the eternal critic and provocateur. But early signs suggest that he is settling into the new role

Until Barack Obama’s election as US president made pro-Americanism less toxic in France, Sarkozy dared not bring Lellouche openly into the government. But he used Lellouche to repair relations with Turkey caused by the official recognition of the Armenian genocide and to smooth France’s re-entry to the integrated NATO command. He took the next step in March by tapping Lellouche to be his special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely on the basis of a parliamentary report Lellouche co-authored in 2008 in which he warned that NATO was “losing the war”.

A man never before entrusted with office, Lellouche has been the eternal critic and provocateur. But early signs suggest that he is settling into the new role. Besides, his depiction by the far left as a Zionist, anti-Muslim neo-conservative was always a caricature. He spent his first five years in Tunis and remembers fondly the “smells, music and the ease of life” as well as the music of Egyptian singer Um Kalthum, who “rocked [him] to sleep” as a boy. His advocacy for Turkey hardly fits the cliché either.

Might Lellouche rise higher? No, if the way Sarkozy has treated the job over the past two years is a guide. He appointed Jean-Pierre Jouyet, an old friend of then Socialist leader François Hollande, simply to destabilise the opposition. He replaced Jouyet with Le Maire to isolate de Ville-pin, whose closest ally Le Maire had been. But Sarkozy has gradually been giving Lellouche responsibility. Just possibly, he is now being tested for higher office.